ConfD integration with FreeRADIUS for Authentication

Although the most common and easiest way to work with ConfD is to use its built-in authentication and authorization (AAA) mechanisms in which all the AAA-related information are being stored in ConfD’s embedded database called CDB, I have often come across customers either during their evaluation of ConfD or their development of ConfD-based applications that have their own customers’ requirements to use an external AAA server such as RADIUS for authentication. There is a section in the ConfD User Guide that describes how to work with external authentication, however, there are currently no examples in ConfD’s already extensive examples collection set that illustrates a pre-integrated solution.

These conversations and the need for examples have prompted me to work on an application note to describe a pre-integrated solution for integrating ConfD with an open-sourced version of RADIUS for authentication. This application note shows you a step-by-step process to use ConfD’s authentication API and the proprietary vendor attributes of RADIUS to store both the user credentials information along with their assigned authorization groups’ information on a RADIUS server called FreeRADIUS. You can access this helpful and insightful application note here.